Is Britain really ‘closed for business’?

Is Britain really ‘closed for business’? That, we’re told, is the view of US ‘Big Tech’ as expressed by Activision Blizzard – the company whose most famous product is the violent videogame Call of Duty – in response to the blocking by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of Activision’s proposed $70 billion merger with Microsoft, which would have given the latter a dominant position in the emergent field of ‘cloud-based gaming’. You don’t need to know exactly what that means to be worried that the world’s digital giants take a dim view of the UK as a marketplace and investment destination. But are they right?

Some pundits have used Activision’s scorn as a prompt to recite the UK’s obvious faults. Our corporate taxes are too high, we no longer offer EU access, our tech skills are woeful, our stock exchange offers a poor platform for high-growth companies and Tory ministers are not as keen as they should be to cut red tape.